Conventionally, the sign language is used in many cases as the information transmission means for the hearing-impaired persons. The sign language is the visual language in which the finger action and the non-finger action are simultaneously used, and the sign language is on the same level as that of the voice language. However, there has been a problem in relation to the way of correlation between the expression by the sign language and the electronic information.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2008-216397 (Patent Document 1) discloses the following technique in order that both of the person who is not hearing-impaired and the person who is hearing-impaired can recognize the information contents easily, quickly, and correctly. That is, the sentence data is subjected to the morphological analysis to extract keywords, and the conversion is performed from the keywords into the itemized text data and the fragmented sign language picture image data to provide a visual display to the hearing-impaired person.
Further, those skilled in the art may easily conceive the proposal of such a technique that the upper body (upper half of the body) of a sign language user (talker) is photographed as an animation image which is subjected to the image analysis to perform the conversion into words and sentences.